Towards a secure electricity grid

The transmission of bulk power within a zone of an interconnected region of an electricity grid is controlled by substation automation systems. The substations are where electricity is routed throughout the grid, as well as the control and communication nodes of the network grid. It is crucial for the security of the electricity grid that there should be no break in the network communication. Currently, IEC 61850 specifies the communication interface and gives utility companies interoperability for Intelligent Electronic Devices of substation automation systems and is intended to support Distributed Wide Area Monitoring, Control and Protection. This requires ultra real-time data feeds that must be trusted. Currently there is no agreed upon security standard that accompanies IEC 61850. In this paper we propose a framework architecture that extends IEC 61850 to capture trusted substation automation by combining (i) Trusted Computing engines, (ii) a Kerberos multicast authentication service, and (iii) a real-time attribute-based access control system. We then integrate this framework into an open source IEC 61850 profiler (a real-time emulator) for substation automation recently released by SISCO, and show that the integrated profiler is IEC 61850 compliant, while supporting integrity, confidentiality and real-time availability (with end-to-end time for critical data feeds less than 4ms), against strong adversaries (including insiders).